Chad Orzel pokes around the NCAA's horrible website to take a look at the graduation rates of scholarship athletes. For the most part, he finds that athletes are graduating at the same or slightly lower rate as their demographic counterparts in the student body at large. There is one question:
This pattern repeats through all the schools I looked at: Duke has 93% overall, 78% for black male athletes, and 83% for black male non-athletes; Syracuse 80/47/64; Stanford 95/87/86; UNC 83/56/63; LSU 56/36/42. Other than Syracuse, which is doing a rotten job, the male athletes graduate at rates that are not too far below those of their non-athletic classmates. (The same basic pattern holds for white male athletes, who graduate at rates very slightly lower than their non-athlete classmates, except at North Carolina where there's an 66/83 disparity. What's up with the Tar Heels?)
I don't really know, but a closer look at the numbers shows that almost all of that discrepancy can be attributed to the baseball team, who only graduated 50% of their (all-white) incoming class of 2000-2001. What is up with that?
Anyway, I may poke around the NCAA's numbers a bit, mining them for interesting things. I've already learned that 1 out of every 5 black men attending Duke is doing so on an athletic scholarship; what else is out there?